


After Order 66....

by Gabriel4Sam



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-04-05 05:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14036892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabriel4Sam/pseuds/Gabriel4Sam
Summary: Three different universes. Three new beginnings. Three times where Obi-Wan Kenobi and Commander Cody meet again after Order 66 and the end of everything.





	1. In the Rebel Alliance...

They lost the other members of the patrol miles ago in the tropical forest. They’re such an embarrassment that they probably already have been eaten by some local fauna. That’s the problem with natural-borns, they can’t keep up, even if CC-2224 is aging twice as fast as them.

Even if he has been demoted again and again, until natural-borns so young they should still drink milk can order him around.

But even like that, he’s the only one keeping on with the target. Not enough to finally put a blaster charge in his back, but enough to chase the brown cloak long past every part of that damn forest they ever had explored. It’s strange. Even hurt, a Jedi is prone to bursts of speed that border on inhuman, even CC-2224 should have been left in the dust long ago.

Finally, a clearing. His helmet adapts to the light of the sun and he sees the Jedi, his back to CC-2224, next to a small ship. His target is trying to escape. CC-2224 takes the shot and another another another.

No one of them strikes down their target.

The Jedi has burst into movement, aerials such as only Force Sensitive could and he’s on CC-2224 so fast it should be impossible. Pain explodes. When he opens his eyes again his blaster lies a few feet away. It could be the other side of the planet, for all the good it does him. He wants to move but an impossible, gigantic hand weights on him, inescapable, inexorable. Fingers are under his chin and they find easily the release of the helmet.

A hand turns his head.

“Hello there,” the target, the Jedi says, and there is triumph in his voice, in the ice of his eyes. Like it’s a long awaited victory, when it was not even seven hours before that the patrol started tracking him.

“If you think you can bargain for your liberty with mine…” CC-2224 threatens.

“Oh, you’re no bait, no blackmails material”, the target says, and his hand on CC-2224 is as gentle as the invisible power pressing on his body is unyielding.

“No, my dear Cody, you’ve always been the prey in this chase.” And there is a strange smile on his mouth, predatory almost. CC-2224 feels dark creeping and fights with all his might but unconsciousness still takes him.

Days later, Cody fins his way to the top of Yavin’s pyramidal structure with a bottle of the strongest alcohol Rex could find him, and every intention to get as drunk as humanly possible. It’s the first time the medics let him go and they will probably yell at him later if he gave himself alcohol poisoning, but it still seems like the best idea of the century. Perhaps after he will succeed in reconstructing himself in something making sense, but for now numbing his mind, alone with that bottle, is incredibly seductive.

Of course, it’s on the top that he finds General Kenobi. He hasn’t seen the Jedi in weeks, in fact since the General brought him back thrown over his shoulder and dropped him in the medics’ clutch.

He had hoped so much to see him, when he was slowly recovering from the chips, when the nightmares kept him awake. Oh, he wasn’t alone, the Force bless Rex and the other Rebels vode, but they weren’t the man Cody had dedicated his life too, the man he had sworn to follow until his death, until suddenly he had shoot him in the back with heavy artillery. He wanted to beg him, to kneel at his feet, even if he didn’t know what he would ask for.

Forgiveness?

Death?

It’s probably why Kenobi disappeared from base for weeks.

“I should deck you,” is of course the first thing Cody growls, because years under brain control have left him without a mouth filter.

Kenobi’s mouth only shivers in response. The bastard.

Cody sits down heavily near the other man, opens the bottle and takes a very decided sip. The taste is herbal and frankly foul. He swallows four long gulps then offers Kenobi the bottle. The General knows how to handle his liquor: he doesn’t even shudder when he drinks.

Cody drinks again. It’s not getting better. He turns to Kenobi. It’s been five years since the fall of the Republic and new lines are on his face, grey hairs more present. He’s wearing leather and body armour, he seems like an officer like any other in their strange misfit army. They stay like that a long time, until the day had melted to dusk, sharing the bottle.

It’s Kenobi who opens his mouth first. For a monk, the man always loved a little too much the sound of his own voice. Cody was waiting for that exact moment. Years and a brainwashing later, he still knows his General. Whatever sentence Kenobi wanted to say is lost: his former Commander has covered his mouth with his own, swallowing the words, his fist tight on Obi-Wan’s collar.

It’s more an attack than a kiss, all teeth, and Kenobi respond in kind. The alcohol, the guilt, the past, it’s all pouring in this kiss and in the one that follows, and in the ones after. Cody is sure their mouths will be red and swollen. He hopes they will be. He wants proof. He wants to be able to press bruises left behind by his General when he’s alone, to remember he’s _Cody_ again.

CC-2224 didn’t have lovers. Tools don’t have lovers.

Cody has a choice and that choice is a bastard with too much smugness and too much sadness who runs into dangerous rebel missions to escape discussion of feelings.

He opens his eyes. His General’s grey eyes are almost black, his breath fast and strongly alcoholised.

“Hello there.” He purrs.

Cody smiles.

 


	2. In the Force...

CC-2224 is killed during the battle of Dantooine, three years after the end of the Republic. His chip never stops working and he spend these years as a flesh puppet, never questioning orders as around him clones troopers die by hundreds, send to the most dangerous missions.

As they cut down opponents to the new regime, Jedi who escaped the first day of the purge, or sometimes small pockets of resistance, CC-2224 never refuses an order.

Good soldiers follow orders.

On Dantooine, they attacks a village supposed to hide a surviving Jedi. It’s a simple mission but the farmers are more organized and determined than they should be, and it’s even without the lightsaber wielding Jedi on their side, cutting through troopers easily.

At the end, the Empire will win, by sheer power. Nevertheless, for the troopers killed that day, it’s still the end. CC-2224 is killed by a grenade, too close for his armour to do some good. He dies and the only mercy is that it’s quick.

CC-2224 dies and Cody wakes up to the impression of an out of control spiral and then to being caught.

“Easy, easy, vod,” a voice said and Cody tries to open eyes he doesn’t have anymore…and succeed.

Mace Windu smiles down at him and Cody squeaks, a sound that dead men definitely aren’t supposed to do.

“I’m dead,” he says, and adds: “You’re dead too”, something accusatory in his tone.

“Yes, we are.”

Cody sits, helped by the Jedi. They’re next to his body and how strange it is.

“We’ll move in a few minutes,” Windu says and Cody nods, watching his…his cadaver with part fascination, part horror.

He ears another cry of horror and turns. Another trooper is down and next to the body, a Twi’lek Jedi helping him seat, the two of them slightly transparent. Cody immediately examines his hands. Yep, slightly transparent too.

He feels Mace Windu’s arms around his shoulders but Windu is transparent too…

“Do you really thing we would abandon you?” Windu asks, then the scenery shifts. They are in a meadow, somewhere sunny and peaceful.

“I feel like I should throw up, but I’m not sure it’s possible.”

“Not that I know,” is the answer, and Cody is sure Master Windu didn’t smile so much before his death.

“I don’t understand.”

Windu smiles, again.

“Every time a vod dies, a Jedi is there to…let’s say catch him.”

Cody tries to make sense of it. Without success.

“When a sentient die,” Windu elaborates, “he joins the Force. Becomes a part of the great everything, I suppose.”

“You suppose? You’ve been dead for years.”

“Well, it only happens if nobody is there to catch them. And I was caught. Some time ago, a Jedi rediscovered how to stay closer to the living. When Order 66 came, he caught us and then helped us train until we too could do it. Like I just did with you. Of course, you can still choose to join what is behind. Now, in ten years, in one hundred.”

“My brothers….”

Cody suddenly remembers everything. The voice in his head and his General and the canon and three years of being nothing more than a weapon. If he needed to breathe, he would hyperventilate.

“Calm, my friend,” Windu said, his hand warm against Cody’ shoulder against all logic.

“You’ll see your brothers soon again. They all chose to wait. They want for all the vod to march far away together.”

“The ones who died first…before the Jedi, did they fade?”

Those who died before Order 66, he doesn’t say. Before dead Jedi apparently caught their murderers’ souls before they passed into the Force. Windu looks above Cody’ shoulders and says:

“Someone caught them.”

Cody turns. The man is tall, dressed like a Jedi, and as transparent as Windu and Cody.

“Commander, it is a pleasure to finally meet you, circumstances of your death notwithstanding. I am named Qui-Gon Jinn.”

Qui-Gon kneels.

“Why?” asks Cody. “Why did you… The Jedi, I understand, but…”

“That’s ok,” he says, “I understand why you don’t see it. But we have time.”

Cody grimaces.

“At the rhythm it’s going, all vode will be caught soon, sir.”

“Call me Qui-Gon. There should be no title in death. You, you especially should call me Qui-Gon.”

“Why me especially?”

“Because, to my great joy and to his great pain, I was the Master of the man you loved until Order 66 separated you,” and Cody would cry if he still could, for the memories of red hair and hidden kisses and for that day in the canyon.

“Did he…Did he refuse to see me?”

Mace Windu snorts.

“See you? Cody, Obi-Wan Kenobi is still alive and preparing the rebirth of the Light.”

And the sun seems to shine brighter in the meadow, because whatever will happens, it’s not by Cody’s hands that the man he loves will perish.”

Years later, when Ben Kenobi dies, Obi-Wan wakes up to the impression of an out of control spiral and then to being caught.

“I’ve got you,” Cody says and Obi-Wan sobs.


	3. On Tatooine

The sad thing is, Darth Vader didn’t really understand Obi-Wan Kenobi. Oh, he thought he did. He thought he caught his treachery, recognized the plot of the Jedi, brought peace to the galaxy, and all that self-satisfied bantha crap he let Palpatine purred in his ear until his brain had turned into some sort of gelatinous substance capable of everything except independent thoughts.

The sad thing was, everybody who really knew and understood Obi-Wan Kenobi was dead, those who really did, like Satine, who knew he would be unhappy at the end, if she asked him to stay, like Bant, the friend of a lifetime gunned down in the middle of the war, like Mace Windu who saw the attachment of his friend and knew Skywalker would one day break his heart.

Even those who knew him almost enough, like poor Padmé who would have perhaps lived if she had searched his help sooner, like Kit Fisto, killed when they were building a friendship as equal, Master to Master.

That’s why nobody thought of searching him on Tatooine.

Until the moment where the thrice damned chip died a quiet death in CC-2224’s head, one day like every other, where the clone had been thrown against a wall by an explosion, on a world the Empire was _pacifying_.

It was CC-2224’s trembling fingers who searched for the release button, but it was Cody who took his helmet off, Cody who breathed for the first time in years, carefully touched the blood who dripped from his nose.

Eyes that were so much like Jango Fett’s , like Boba Fett’s, less for the shape and the colour, even if they were almost identical, more for the piercing way they dissected the world, observed the battlefield.

“Kriff that,” he said, very matter-of-fact.

Two months later, Ben Kenobi opened his door to an irate clone with a bad sunburn on his nose and a lot of questions.

“Oh dear,” he said.

“Exactly,” snapped Cody.

“Oh dear,” Obi-Wan said again.

“Living alone is getting your silver tongue rusty, General.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Yes, you certainly aren’t him anymore, because my General wouldn’t let my surviving _vode_ live as puppets, worse than everything, worse than slaves.”

His voice has risen until he was almost shouting, but the two months necessary to find his old commanding officer his anger at the state of the galaxy and the fate of his brothers had nicely festered. Something hard passed on Obi-Wan’s face but it could have been a trick of the light, because he was almost immediately calm again, and he opened the door wider.

“Come in, if you want to yell.”

“Yes, that would be awkward if the lizard population heard me, I suppose. Couldn’t you find somewhere more in the middle of kriffin nowhere? I almost needed more time to find you in this kriffin desert that to find the planet, and I had to steal another speeder because mine melted!”

Obi-Wan made a face again but didn’t add anything and started to make them tea.

“Don’t you have something stronger?” Cody asked, struggling to not yell again. He hadn’t realized how disappointed he was in the other man before seeing him.

“I confess I indulged a little too much at my beginning here and thought prudent to not stock liquor anymore.”

Cody said nothing and accepted the tea, sitting on a low pillow, observing his General.

“When did your chip stopped working?”

“Two months ago.”

“It didn’t take long to find me.”

“Oh please, I needed less than that. I’m late because I found the Rebellion first. I thought…I thought you would be there. I thought you would fight for my brothers.”

Once again, there was a whisper of emotion other than that infuriating calm, right at the corners of the Jedi’s eyes, but he squashed it again.

“Some people could think I wouldn’t want to help them, considering my brethren’s terrible fate and the role the _vode_ played.”

Cody shrugged.

“I know you better than that.”

“Do you?”

“Found you, didn’t I?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose you did.”

“And you don’t see me rolling at your feet asking for forgiveness for the canyon, do you?”

“You aren’t responsible for that day”. And even if Cody refused to feel guilty for being brainwashed, because it was a violation, and the Force should be ashamed to have let all of that happen, still, it eased something deep inside him.

“See? I know you better.”

Obi-Wan abandoned his tea and touched Cody’s hand, after a second of hesitation.

“The fate of the vode is horrible. But I know what you want of me, and I can’t go with you. I can’t leave this planet, not yet. No, don’t yell. Let me show you first”

And Cody obeyed, like he always had. He saw and he understood and it didn’t make anything easier because who would fight for the vode, now, if his General was tethered here by young Luke.

“You will,” Obi-Wan said in the quiet of the night, watching the fire instead of Cody.

“You’ll save the survivors because you’re you, the highest ranking, the big brother, because they are other who will help you, because...” He sighed.

Cody made a face and groaned something not very polite. He didn’t feel angry anymore, just tired and the task before him seemed helpless, endless. Kriff, he probably needed a mind healer, but he doubted they were people trained in helping brainwashed victims manage their anger. Or perhaps they were. He couldn’t be the only vod free of that damn chip. And he was pretty sure the Alliance would be interested in freeing people who would certainly want to join after, so he knew where he would start.

Obi-Wan took his hand.

“I have contacts in the Rebel Alliance, some who could help you,” a silence during which Cody felt some vindictive pleasure in knowing their ideas could still run the same course, “and between missions, you could come back here.”

Cody turned in his direction and attacked his mouth, without any prelude. It wasn’t a very good first kiss, it was too desperate to be anything less than sloppy.

But it was perfect, because it had been years coming, because Obi-Wan pushed himself into the kiss with the same hunger, because the bed, even too small as he was, was just a few feet away, ready to welcome them. It was perfect even if too quick and fuelled in part by anger and perhaps a little too much bruising. And when Obi-Wan yielded under him, lost in pleasure, Cody swore to himself that he would come back to Tatoine again, and again and again…

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr under the same name, come and say hi!


End file.
